As a considerable contribution to convenience and efficiency of businesses and other institutions which have the recurring occasion to send variable information to a plurality of customers, clients or patrons, business forms have been developed which often include preprinting on the forms of fixed information (including fixed information about the sender, detailed step-by-step instructions as to how the recipient is requested to respond to reception of communication embodied in and on the form, and graphic and/or verbal highlighting of the fields, zones or areas where variable information will have been provided on the form by the business before sending it to the recipient) and/or variable information is to be placed on some part of the received form by the recipient. Such forms also often include a return envelope and a remittance stub which are detachably provided for the convenience of the recipient in responding as requested by the sender.
With the continuing development of computers, now useful in business at all levels from the multinational giants down to the mom and pop corner grocery, and the continuing proliferation of peripheral equipment which is designed to be operated interactively with, or driven by such business computers, it represents a continuing challenge to the talents and resourcefulness of the designers and manufacturers of business forms to avoid having some advance made in these other fields detract from the usefulness, salability and business-perception of convenience and enhanced efficiency represented by such business forms.
It is as if there is a kind of friendly warfare being pursued, in which any strong advance made in business computers and peripherals aimed at making such equipment and associated software better and more useful to more businesses is likely to expose the need for conception and development of a new generation of business forms. Of course some times it is a leap in the conception and development of business forms that draws out a response from the innovators of computers, peripheral equipment and software. Nevertheless, in both cases, when the two sides respond creatively, society is the beneficiary of each round of conception and development.
It is in the course of such a round of conception and development that the present invention arose:
A further feature of many business forms is that variable information is applied to them by computer-contolled printing apparatus, e.g. so as to apply the recipient's name and address, account number, previous balance, payments and other credits, interest, new debits,, new balance, new amount due, statement date, payment due date and the like. Often this is facilitated by providing the business with the blank forms in two, three or more parts, each in series multiple with a series of sprocket holes running along one or both side margins. The business or other institution feeds one or more of these series of form parts through printers for variable information, and through a collater or other assembler/uniter apparatus for creating assembled, individualized communications which are successively detached and dispatched to the various addresses. Whereas in an early generation, such series of forms or form parts were variably-printed on typewriters and similar humanly- or computer-operated impact printers with paper drive sprockets on their bails, and in a successive generation with endless-chain, daisy wheel, dot matrix and other advanced, higher-speed impact-type printers, more recently the state-of-the-art for business printing of statements, invoices, solicitations and the like has come to include ink jet printers, laser-using ink jet printers and other non-impact-type printers (NIPs). Such printers, while they are not capable of displacing impact-type printers for every task (e.g. because of the need, or desire, sometimes to print on two or more layers of sheets simultaneously, or to print only on one or more inner sheets while they are covered by a sheet on which the information is not to appear), have many advantages the attractions of which are not to be denied. Included among these are speed, reliability, lack of so many moving parts, and the ability to print on an exposed surface without leaving a telltale mechanical imprint on underlying sheets.
For a supplier of business forms, the appearance and proliferation in business use of non-impact printers represents a challenge--how to devise and provide business forms that carry forward the best, most convenient and familiar features that hitherto state-of-the-art business forms have provided, yet accomodate differences necessitated by use of non-impact printers, and even to push outward the frontier of development of business forms so as to make them even more useful and convenient in the age of non-impact printers.
Although further developments in the field of non-impact printers are almost certain to continue to be made and to reach the marketplace embodied in new machines, at present the non-impact printers which seem to be receiving most widespread business acceptance are ones which will not reliably accept multiple part forms (print on preassembled sheet material which is more than one sheet thick all over or in certain regions), nor on sheets which have open die-cut windows, nor on sheets with glassine patch-closed die-cut windows, nor on sheets bearing uncovered strips, patches or spots of glue (adhesive) which is intended to be later activated for use in attaching the sheets to others or to other regions of the same sheets. Part of the restrictions at this stage in the commmercial development of laser-type and other non-impact printers is a sheet feeder problem, part is an ink jet control problem, and some is a heat-generation problem. As to the latter, by way of explanation it may be worth pointing out that as a sheet is being printed on by a laser-type non-impact printer at least in presently commercially available machines, it has been unavoidable as a practical matter to prevent heat produced by the laser beam from prematurely activating one or more regions of glue if glue is previously applied to any part of the sheet. Premature glue activation causes the glue to adhere the form to sheet feeding structures in the non-impact printer, or in assembler/uniter apparatus, or to other sheets, or to foul any of these with transferred glue.